Although the demand for printing electronic documents (EDs) is decreasing because of recent improvements in computer displays, there are still those who generate hardcopies of EDs for purposes of reading the EDs. For example, some readers may simply prefer reading a hardcopy over staring at a computer screen. In other instances, hardcopies of the EDs may be provided to a group of people at an informal presentation, or in other situations where reading from a projector screen or computer display is not convenient.
An ED may specify any number of pages having both confined textboxes (i.e., a textbox where all characters of the associated paragraphs are within the perimeter of the textbox) and overflowed textboxes (i.e., a textbox where at least one character of the associated paragraphs is positioned outside the perimeter of the textbox). Accordingly, the ED includes the positions, dimensions, text (i.e., strings, paragraphs), horizontal justifications of each paragraph, and vertical justification of the textbox for each textbox. It is the responsibility of a Page Rendering Device (PRD) to layout the textboxes and the paragraphs as specified by the ED.
In general, standard layout engines within PRDs are well configured to process confined textboxes. However, overflowed textboxes present non-trivial problems for these layout engines. Despite the potential problems for the layout engines, users still wish to create EDs with overflowed textboxes and use existing layout engines to process the EDs.